Harry L. Swinney (born April 10, 1939) is an American
physicist
A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe.
Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate caus ...
noted for his contributions to the field of
nonlinear dynamics
In mathematics and science, a nonlinear system is a system in which the change of the output is not proportional to the change of the input. Nonlinear problems are of interest to engineers, biologists, physicists, mathematicians, and many other ...
.
Personal life
Harry Leonard Swinney was born in Opelousas, Louisiana, on April 10, 1939. His parents were Leonard R. Swinney and Ethel Bertheaud Swinney. In 1967 Harry Swinney married Gloria T. Luyas, and in 1978 they had a son, Brent Luyas Swinney. Brent died of cancer in 1995 and Gloria died of cancer in 1997. Harry Swinney married Lizabeth Kelley on August 12, 2000.
Education
Swinney attended elementary school in Austin, Texas, and in 1957 graduated from Homer
Louisiana
Louisiana , group=pronunciation (French: ''La Louisiane'') is a state in the Deep South and South Central regions of the United States. It is the 20th-smallest by area and the 25th most populous of the 50 U.S. states. Louisiana is borde ...
High School. In 1961 he was awarded a B.S. with honors in physics by Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College), where he was inspired by his physics professor and research mentor, Jack H. Taylor. In 1968 he was awarded a Ph.D. in physics by Johns Hopkins University; his advisor was
Herman Z. Cummins.
Career
Swinney was an assistant professor of physics at New York University (1971–73) and was associate professor and then professor at the City College of the City University of New York (1973–78). Since 1978 Swinney has been on the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, where he is now Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair of Physics and director of the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics.
Honors
Swinney is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1992) and a fellow of the American Physical Society (1977), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1991), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1999), and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (2009). He was awarded the American Physical Society Fluid Dynamics Prize (1995), the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Jürgen Moser Prize (2007), the European Geosciences Union Richardson Medal (2012), and the Boltzmann Medal (2013) of the Commission on Statistical Physics of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. He was a Guggenheim Fellow (1983–84) and he was inducted into The Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars (1984). He was awarded honorary doctoral degrees by Rhodes College (2002), The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2008), and the University of Buenos Aires (2010).
Research contributions
Swinney conducts research on instabilities, chaos, and pattern formation in diverse systems, including fluid, chemical, and granular media. Swinney together with his students, postdocs, and other collaborators have:
*determined the decay rate of order parameter fluctuations for fluids near the critical point
*observed a transition to chaos—deterministic yet nonperiodic behavior—in experiments on a fluid flow
*characterized chaos from time series data by computing the largest Lyapunov exponent (rate of loss of predictability) and the
mutual information
In probability theory and information theory, the mutual information (MI) of two random variables is a measure of the mutual dependence between the two variables. More specifically, it quantifies the " amount of information" (in units such ...
(general dependence of two variables)
*discovered multiple transitions to different patterns of fluid flow between concentric independently rotating cylinders
*designed a laboratory experiment that yielded a stable vortex for conditions mimicking those on Jupiter. This result provides a plausible explanation of the stability of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, which was first observed by
Robert Hooke
Robert Hooke FRS (; 18 July 16353 March 1703) was an English polymath active as a scientist, natural philosopher and architect, who is credited to be one of two scientists to discover microorganisms in 1665 using a compound microscope that ...
in 1664.
*observed the emergence of a spatial pattern in a chemical system, as predicted in 1952 by
Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical com ...
*determined the scaling of power dissipated in strongly turbulent flow between concentric rotating cylinders
*observed anomalous diffusion and Lévy flights in a fluid flow
*discovered localized structures, dubbed "oscillons", in an oscillating granular layer; oscillons were subsequently found in many dynamical systems. The granular experiments also investigated various extended spatial patterns, shock waves, and fluctuations.
*observed resonant pattern formation with frequency locking in chemical systems
*found fractal cascades of waves on the edges of leaves, flowers, and garbage bags
*found a resonance in internal wave boundary currents generated by tidal flow on a slope; this resonance apparently selects the angle (typically three degrees) of the continental slopes of the oceans
*discovered a new protein, Slf, which is produced by neighboring colonies of Paenibacillus dendritiformis bacteria. Slf is lethal to bacteria near the edge of a colony that faces another P. dendritiformis colony.
*found that fluctuations in the number N of bacteria swimming in a volume varied as N^(3/4), in contrast to the N^(1/2) scaling of fluctuations for systems in thermodynamic equilibrium
Other
Swinney, together with Rajarshi Roy and Kenneth Showalter, founded a two-week ''Hands-On Research School'' for early career scientists from developing countries
handsonresearch.org The schools, sponsored by the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, are described in a 3-minute vide
here
References
External links
Homepage of H.L. Swinney at the University of Texas at AustinList of H.L. Swinney's students and postdocsCurrent research
{{DEFAULTSORT:Swinney, Harry
1939 births
Living people
21st-century American physicists
Chaos theorists
University of Texas at Austin faculty
Fellows of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
Johns Hopkins University alumni
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
Rhodes College alumni
Fellows of the American Physical Society